Documentary: Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher

 

For the past few weeks, the movie “Jesus Revolution” has been making a stir in the church, for good or ill, I cannot say. I’ve not seen the movie, and really don’t plan to anytime soon.

On a tangent that is still related, a few years ago, I bought a digital copy of “Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher”, a documentary about Lonnie Frisbee. From some things I’ve heard about “Jesus Revolution”, Frisbee is portrayed in the movie, so I thought it might be a bit interesting to take a look at this film.

Summary

This documentary is a very brief look at the life of Lonnie Frisbee. At under an hour in length, it doesn’t go into great details, but it does say a bit about both his highs and his lows, his roles in popularizing both the Calvary Chapel and Vineyard movements, and also his moral failings.

Tone

The tone of the documentary is very pro-Frisbee, though they don’t completely excuse his failings, nor do they say that he did not play a part in his own downfall.

But they do paint Frisbee in a way that is impressive to the point of grandiose. One example is at around 30:15 Chuck Smith Jr says, “But with Lonnie, it was like walking with an apostle, someone who was tuned into a divine frequency.” 

As such, then, I find myself a bit skeptical of some of the claims about Frisbee and the things that are said to have happened around him when he ministered. The film makers acknowledge that there is a lot of fakery in the church when it comes to miracles, but they also indicate that Frisbee was not a fake and the miracles around him were not fakery.

Marriage

One of the big controversies about Frisbee is that he was a man who even as a minister also practiced homosexual sex. As such, then, the fact that after his conversion he married a woman named Connie is important. One thing it may indicate is that he was trying to put behind him his old sinful ways, including his sinful sexual practices.

But it was a marriage that had it difficulties. No surprise, as any marriage will have difficulties. But at least in part, these difficulties came from the church itself. At 31:45, Chuck Smith Jr says, “My dad’s philosophy of minister had harmed Lonnie and Connie’s marriage.”, and later at 32:20 he says, “My dad’s belief was that the hierarchy of values was God, minstry, family., and just after this, Connie says that she knew this gave Lonnie “…carte blanche to be as irresponsible as he wanted to be…and that’s when I felt like I was fighting God for my husband’s attention”

Perhaps the most telling comment, from my view, is what Connie said about a meeting she had with Pastor Smith about her and Lonnie’s marriage, 32:10, “Chuck Smith told, looked at me and said, the only thing that’s important right now, Connie, is that people are getting saved.”

I find this mindset troubling, this idea that questions of character and personal life are not important because, well, things are happening. People are, at least in theory and maybe even in fact, getting saved. The church, the Calvary Chapel, had grown, it had grown fast and it had grown large. What else was important?

It’s too easy to play “What if?” games, because such speculations can be fun, but in the end they most often don’t matter much. Nothing Chuck Smith did or didn’t do, nothing he said, excuses Frisbee’s sexual immoralities. Yet Smith’s job as a pastor was to shepherd the flock of God, and Frisbee was one of his sheep, and one part of caring for Frisbee was in helping him in his marriage, not to encourage him to shunt it aside as unimportant because Frisbee could draw crowds and get responses.

There’s something ugly about all this. Assuming that what Connie and Smith Jr said in this documentary is true, then there is very much an impression that some people were very willing to let Frisbee do whatever he wanted with little to no accountability. So long as he brought success to the church, they were happy with it all.

I hope that’s unfair, that people like Pastor Smith and maybe others in the church were more concerned with Frisbee as a person then these statements may lead one to think. I hope so.

Discarded

The tone of the later part of this document is that Lonnie was used by Smith and Wimber, that they “enjoyed the goodies”, things like sudden and dramatic church growths, yet when his sexually immoral practices were finally brought to light, they discarded him.

In this, the documentary does leave open some reasons for hoping that’s an overly negative view of Smith and Wimber. It does mention that Frisbee had problems with his own pride, that he wanted to do thing his way and didn’t like being restricted.

My Thoughts

In many ways, I look at Lonnie Frisbee with a great deal of pity.

The overall sense of adulation in this document, of people speaking of Frisbee as if he were so special, is not so much comforting to me as troubling. All these people had this high and grand opinion of Frisbee, they seemed to think he was nearly untouchable, he was like an apostle, he could heal blind eyes and sore mouths, everywhere he went God did all these incredible things. And so much of this started happening not long after his conversion, when he was filled with zeal but still also filled with all kinds of strange ideas and bizarre notions.

Consider that, then ponder on this biblical passage:

I Timothy

The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. 2 Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, 3 not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. 4 He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, 5 for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church? 6 He must not be a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil. 7 Moreover, he must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace, into a snare of the devil.

In this context of this blog post, two things get my attention in this passage. One is verses 4-5, about the overseer’s children and household, and what was said to Connie when she went to Smith for help with marriage difficulties. We may well say that Frisbee proves the truth of this passage, he was a man who did not know how to manage his own household, and so he could not rightly care for God’s church.

But it was verse 6 that I had thought of at first, where Paul wrote that an overseer must not be “ a recent convert”. It seems as if Frisbee had not long been a covert before he ended up at Smith’s church and they began using him to draw in the hippies.

And what happened? Frisbee grew proud, he became conceited, and he fell into ugly sexual sins and condemnations.

The cult of youth is very strong in the church, and perhaps was even back at this time, the 1960s and 70s. Youth With A Mission was around at that time, with their vision of “waves of young people”. But if I look at the New Testament, what I see is not a great emphasis on young people, but rather a great desire for maturity in the church, for the believers to grow and become mature in their understanding. This cult of youth is completely missing from the early church.

And this difference is important. If a church tailors its message and methods to a certain group of people, if it wants to draw in young people, then may we ask, who is that church’s real god? But if a church’s god is God, then it will know that the message it preaches to the young is the same message it preaches to the old, the message of people being sinners and of Christ dying to save sinners by grace through faith.

Perhaps there was something admirable in Smith’s desire to reach to hippies, but he was wrong to place the responsibility so heavily on a Christian newbie like Frisbee. If Frisbee needed anything, ti was to be taught, not to teach, not at that time, not as someone who ideas still tended toward the wacky and outlandish.

Conclusion

This is a fascinating documentary. Keeping in mind that it’s difficult to summarize a life in only a hour, and that it’s slanted pretty heavily in favor of Frisbee, it’s still a documentary worth seeing if you’re interested in this time period and the people involved in what is called the Jesus People.